DIE TO LIVE

I confess I am a bit of a phony.  I often write about being fearless and living life unfettered by social convention, but I am quite sociable.  I actually really enjoy being around people, and the thrill of making normal people stare at my "out there" hair or make-up has paled in the years since high school.

I don't live on any fringe of society and gave up nonconformity when it became the rage.  No tattoos.  Only one piercing per ear, and I am beginning to seriously believe that dying my hair outrageous colors is an unrighteous use of money.  In short, I am a very normal, middle of the road, past Republican who fears change and instability with the best of you.

What I have to bring to the idea of fearlessness is that it can take other, more subtle forms than those we imagine.  In place of the image of firefighter or soldier, place the image of people sharing their honest opinions.  Instead of skateboarding, base-jumping and driving fast on the interstate, place commitment to a choice.

Fearlessness is only true when we dare loss.  Defying death is thrilling in the extreme: committing the body to a course that may destroy it.  When I jumped out of an airplane, I absolutely accepted the fact that I might die or be horribly wounded.  I simply decided I would more regret not celebrating possibility than I would regret whatever bad consequences ensued.  Yet, no one needs to skydive or play high stakes poker to encounter the thrill of daring loss.

Every moment is next to death, no matter how mundane our surroundings.  No future is assured.  No plan is without failure.  No contact is without pain.  All that we are and have will end at some time.  All that we touch, share and savor shall also pass away.  Any number of accidents, diseases and relationship losses will assail us.  Death and paralysis, possibilities in jumping from an airplane, are also possibilities in every moment of the day.  Intending to dare the loss is what makes the difference in the experience.  Ultimately, life is more about possibility than it is about control.

In that way, waking in the morning is a fearless act.  In that way, loving another human being is a fearless act.  In that way, cooking a meal, touching the dirt, smiling at a stranger, dropping an extra dollar on the sidewalk are all acts of fearlessness.  Safety is an illusion we cling to at the expense of our souls.  We stop daring each other.  We stop daring failure, trust, hope and acts of integrity in terror that we may lose something we are destined to lose anyway.  Life is not holding on.  Life is letting go.

HOLY SOUND

Do you think the universe sings?  I do, and I don't mean metaphorically.  It is a strange quality of extended silence, that it engenders tunes in me.  When I have been sitting still for a long while, meditating, or walking a path through the woods,  I want to sing something.  Lacking the skills to create new songs out of the sounds that call me, I usually sing a camp song, a favorite from my iTunes, or a hymn.

The quality I want to stress, however, is that the songs from me are a response to the sound I hear from the world around me-not noise from the will, or an attempt to confront the quiet.  I have to actively suppress the urge sometimes, and sometimes, I only discover that I am singing because of the funny looks I get from the people passing me on the sidewalk.  It is as if there is a soundtrack running underneath the action of my life which sometimes erupts into a song.  

I only realized recently that some people don't hear music all of the time.  Music for them, is something that comes from others, or something created solely in the processes of the brain.  They do not hear the sky ringing sound before a storm; they do not hear an expectant string section humming within a crowd of people;  they do not experience a great bronze cymbal clash when the sun pierces through a shadowed stand of trees.  

I do.  I contend others do as well.  I contend that some of us are oriented to hearing, and that the universe really does have a beat.  It is a noisy, boisterous place, whose cacophony is pounding out the meter of dying and living from the deep core of our planet to the vast, dark matter of space.  That song vibrates through our blood and bones, even if our ears are not equipped to pick it up.  It sounds in us.   After all, sound is only that-vibrations communicated from one instrument to another.  

I believe that sound calls forth response from those that hear it, the way wolves will pass their calls from one throat to the next.  I believe that the soul and singing are bound into that sound.  When I stand amongst people too afraid to clap their hands to the rhythm of a song, or with people so walled in behind their societal roles, they cannot bear to sing unless another starts the tune, I am convinced that there is some illness of the soul at work in the world.

 

SEEKING PERMISSION

I was recently asked, "How long have you known you can sing?"  It was a great question.  For me, singing has never been: I am a good singer, so I will sing.  As I remember, mostly I have had to learn how not to sing; learning when to hold back my noise so it does not disrupt others; learning to understand that some situations need silence;  giving others room to sing.

As I understand singing, it has very little to do with talent.  I am convinced that I would still need to sing if I had a broken down and rusty voice, or no sense whatsoever of pitch.  

As I think about that question, it makes me feel sad for us.  We seem to have lost the idea that what we are called to be comes from within us.  We have replaced it with the idea that we should try on outside purposes until one fits.  Outside purposes include such things as:

1. Get a college degree in something useful so you will always have a job.

2. You are pretty.  You should become a model.

3. Women are emotionally unstable, physically weak, practically incapable and universally good mothers.  

4. Everyone wants success and admiration.

5. Dads can fix everything.

6. There is nothing we can do to stop this.

7. Only the strong survive.

I do not mean to suggest that healthy souls are always the ones that break rules.  I mean to suggest that when we stifle an inner truth because of rules, we risk soul sickness.  There are no ordinary people.  There are no unimportant people.  There are no worthless people.  There are no unlovable people.  There are no ugly people.  When we live believing we are any of these things, we are not living an inner truth.  We are wearing the lies given to us by our community and our need to fit into it.  

I am fortunate.  When I acted freely from myself and sang that first time, people must have liked it.  I could have been born in a family that hates music.  I could have been born deaf.  I could have had a nasty, angry music teacher whose love for abstract perfection spited my learning spirit.  Instead, I have always had support in pursuing the thing that has always filled me with joy.  

Nevertheless, the songs came to me unbidden.  They would have been there without the good fortune.  When I was young, I was wise enough to know that.  It is only as I get old that I think my purpose is the same as "what I am good at," or "what others think is good for me."  

To sing, you must free your soul.  You must open the doors and windows and listen.  You must tune out all the words and structures built between you, your life and your death.  Then, it may be that you find yourself singing because you can't stop singing, rather than singing because someone gave you permission.  

 

CREATED

I often ponder the nature of God.  I won't bore you with a litany of ideas, but I would like to share one that really resonates in me, an idea about the nature of God that sings for me.  It is the idea of God expressed in the blog title Created Creative .  It is the idea that God is creative.  God makes things.  God imagines things.  God puts commonplace things together in unique and amazing ways.  God plays with the qualities of things so that new things can be born.

I love this idea.  It is anchored in my faith tradition, but it should be rich for even an atheist seeking change for humanity.  Creativity is branded into the human soul.  People make things.  People imagine things.  People put commonplace things together in unique and amazing ways.  People mix up stuff until something new is born.  

In an interview on the Palladium Boots documentary Detroit Lives, Wayne Kramer, MC5 guitarist said, "[S]omething can come out of nothing; I mean, this is what artists have always done, is create something out of nothing."  I remember an early experience of awe looking up at Morrow Point Dam on the Gunnison River.  At some point, humans walked naked through this world eating raw food for lack of the idea of fire, and here I stood at the foot of a concrete wall harnessing the rage of a river to produce electricity for three states.  Something created out of nothing.  Material forged from an infinity of ideas. 

When my soul is stuffed up and sniffly from worries and pessimism, I like to engage the idea of God as creative; God by nature using detritus and chaos to make something from the nothing.  That idea helps me sing.  That idea supports imagination and possibility.  That idea is how new worlds come to be born.    

SING HOPE

True fatalism requires silence.  True nihilism seeks oblivion.  I have to take that to mean, then, that the pessimistic news columns and prophecies of destruction are voices raised in fear against the forces of life.  After all, if there is no turning back from ecocide-why waste time talking?  Why not just sit in the sand and enjoy these last sunsets?   If there is no hope for a better system, why feel angry at corruption, greed and power-mongering?  Why not just bow beneath your shackles and submit to reality?

Ulysses wanted to hear the voices of sirens, but he respected their power over his imagination, so he had himself tied to his mast-a way to hear without being carried away; because voices are powerful.  They enter our brains with feeling, personality and ideas.  Without restraints, without tying ourselves to some inner mast, they can call us to our own demise.   If we begin to believe that panic and anger are the truth, rather than hearing voices of fearful souls seeking to deny destruction or vulnerability, we risk falling under the spell of the powers of vandalism and degradation.  

If we hear souls speaking, and if we realize the apocalypse suggests itself only against some idea of supposed to be, neither fate nor emptiness can be the truth.  Fear only exists because of hope.  That being the case, I can sing against fear.  I can close my eyes, tied to the mast, and commit to hope instead.  I can raise my voice so the sirens know I am out there, waiting for their worst and unafraid.   I can join my own ululations,  and in the same frenzy of speaking say: transformation and creation; change and possibility; something new; something good.

Sing hope, even if it comes out as a scream.  You may hear fear, but do not mistake it for the truth.  Do not give it power.  It is a small and shivering thing that holds itself tight against the dark.  Find a friend.  Bang a drum and raise a ruckus.  Blaze out the truth that tomorrow comes, and that whatever else it brings, it contains hope and possibility.  After all, if all the lights do go out tomorrow, we'll only be proven wrong, but no one will be around to know it.

CREATION

Fearless living is going your own way across the river.  It is believing in the ford no one else can see.  Fearless living is walking the tightrope without a net.  It is balancing on a thin line with destruction at either side.  Fearless living is embodied in the prophet, whose voice can only be known as truth after the prediction has come true.

Fearless living is belief.

If you are like me, you may look for supporters before voicing an opinion.  If you are like me, you may imagine the judge's opinion is the truth.  If you are like me, you may think "people like this" is the same as "this is good; or "people agree with me" is the same as "this is right."

Yet, the truly inspired and revolutionary expressions are rarely the result of considered opinions and carefully crafted agreement.  Instead, they are often the result of someone's blind trust.  People revere the music of J.S. Bach and Mozart, but neither composer achieved much acclaim while he lived.  Their music was largely ignored and and rejected.  Nevertheless, both composers believed in the validity of their creative impulses, and it is their notes that somehow transformed and communicated themselves into all European-derived music since.

Rather than supported, arbitrated, and popular, their music was brave.  That raw bravery (or, perhaps, megalomaniacal assurance) is integral to true creation.  There really is no way to know in advance whether a creative expression will be a success.  Creation requires wild guesses, and an acceptance of failure and loss.

So how do I decide that I must speak up and out?  I must create?   I must express?  That requires a belief in my inherent worth that society tells me is unhealthy.  Yet, an artist cannot be constrained by society.  I have to decide to see through and past society to speak truth.  That is the fact about revelation-there really is destruction on either side.  The water may actually be as deep as it seems.  There is no way to know the outcome before it happens.  I simply have to choose whether or not I believe more in myself than I do in the expectations of others.

CHORALE

This week, the idea that captured my imagination came about by listening to a wind ensemble.  I was reminded by their music that people who have experienced near death report that the music on the other side is light, flutey music which is simple and free from dissonance.  Some philosophies suggest that perfect sound can be achieved through a universal vowel at a particular pitch-a tone without dissonance or difference that somehow expresses all that is.  I imagined an eternity of such perfection and found myself dismayed.

Truth is, I like dissonance.  I like the beat and thunder.  I like Romantic chords and timpani.  I like the lack of resolution and the ways in which various sounds can come into conflict with one another and merely by moving slightly farther away or closer together, find themselves in accord.   I like the sound when Charles Ives' America the Beautiful bends in the middle and loses all coherence for a moment.  It says something about life when it appears to fall apart; when it chooses to go in an unforeseen direction; when it ends in the familiar strains and you wonder which part of what you heard was an illusion.

Barber's Adagio for Strings spends its entire length sustaining dissonance, maintaining an exquisite tension that never actually breaks.  Masterfully, the listener is left hanging in a question without an answer-having felt some sort of unsettling movement that was never fully released into action.  You will know if you have heard this played well, when you leave the performance hall still feeling a tremor deep inside, and unsure exactly what it portends.

I turn away from an idea of Heaven mostly because it seems to be an idea about the end of tension, collision, individuality and change.  It purports to be a perfection that allows for no difference.  All the discussions are done there, no questions left.  All limits are finished.   I think about those ideas and I am afraid.  What if Heaven lacks dissonance and tension because it is dead.  What if a yearning toward Heaven is nothing more than a yearning toward nihilism?

But then again, maybe Heaven is not about the single tone.  Perhaps perfection is more like the chorale.

The chorale requires individual voices submitting their own inclinations to the composer's idea in some configuration of altos, tenors, basses or sopranos.  Vibratos and straight tones blend.  Maturity and craft are lifted by the brash energy of youth and individual daring. The music of a chorale relates sounds and silences, dissonance and resolution, lyric and rhythm.  Though notes may come into serious conflict with each other, the singers are safe to lean into this dangerous sound knowing it means something significant that cannot be said without clash.  And the important thing for the singer is not the final statement of the chorale, but in the exact moments of each voice being what and where it is intended to be.  The glory of the final chord only exists because of the intricate patterns that preceed it.  

Maybe perfection is easier imagined as singing in the choir:  dissonance, resolution, relation, surrender, power and participation placed carefully into a complex and passionate composition.